From Piczo to PRH: Jade LB on the journey of Keisha the Sket

Let me take you back in time. Back to AOL dial-up internet and only being able to log on past 6 p.m. after begging your mum to get off the phone so you can chat to your friends on MSN—the very same ones you had been at school with a mere three hours ago.

The year is 2005. We are on the cusp of digital revolution. No one has heard of the iPhone, the Blackberry is the king of this castle, and teenagers are bluetoothing each other a raucous story of sex and violence written in text speak, one that, most thrillingly, is set in London and stars a cast of cool, sexy Black characters. Initially titled Da Story by the anonymous author Jade LB, the text soon went viral—spreading through inner-city London and other places in the UK like wildfire—and took on a life of its own, becoming known as Keisha the Sket.

Originally serialised on social networking and blogging platform Piczo, which LB describes as a “childish cross between Squarespace and Myspace,” the story of Keisha the Sket was uploaded chapter by chapter every couple of weeks by the author, who was then only 13. It followed the raunchy and sometimes devastating adventures of feisty, hilarious “top sket” (slang for “slut”) Keisha, laying bare Black womanhood, masculinity and trauma. 

Given how audacious and bold the text is, I’m surprised by LB’s quiet and restrained manner when we meet over Zoom. In fact, although she seems collected and self-assured, she is not as confident in her magnum opus as you might expect. She was initially reluctant to re-engage with the story of Keisha the Sket and it was only after becoming disillusioned with the international development sector, after completing her Masters degree, that she decided to think of what she might be able to do with the text. “My politics were completely out of whack with what I had seen and experienced in academia, with these people that had been in the industry for such a long time. I think I came out of my Masters thinking, ‘I could never work with these pricks’,” she says. “So I got cracking with brainstorming ideas and things [about Keisha the Sket].”

With Merky I felt really assured that, if anything, the people at this imprint will always remain hot and really believe in this book. I really couldn’t reconcile another home for Keisha the Sket

LB was first introduced to the #Merky Books team—and to the prospect of publishing a book—after attending a literary event with poet Suli Breaks, which she says is what propelled her to learn more about how the industry worked. “This idea of even having an agent was completely foreign to me,” she says. “I remember sitting down one day and Googling some of the authors that I really respected and just typing questions in like ‘Who is Bernardine Evaristo’s agent?’ ‘Who is Candice Carty-Williams’ agent?’ and just finding people and sending out emails, not even knowing how this process works or what I’m supposed to do.”

Following an auction—triggered by her agent, Rachel Mann of Jo Unwin Literary Agency, to “get publishers’ feet moving”—LB signed with #Merky Books. She was confident that the imprint would be able to offer “cultural sensitivity” during the publication process. She says: “There was more money and things of that nature being offered by other imprints, but I was really apprehensive that somewhere down the line I would come to find that actually these guys may not be listening to me or might not know what they’re necessarily doing with this, or their desire and zeal for this might go cold. With Merky I felt really assured that, if anything, the people at this imprint will always remain hot and really believe in this book. I really couldn’t reconcile another home for Keisha the Sket.” #Merky Books founder and London-native Stormzy was also very excited at the prospect of signing the book: “They played me a voice note from him during my first meeting and he was screaming!” 

That said, there is no denying that we are experiencing an acute shift in the types of books the industry is embracing at the moment. When asked if this book would have been published in the same way a decade ago, LB is frank: “Erm, by Penguin, no. Maybe an independent platform that was just finding its feet—potentially, yes. Independently [self-publishing], possibly. But the way that it’s happened now and the way that it’s taken the core of the industry by storm, no, no way.”

There are still sometimes points at which I feel that hairy, prickly shame feeling encroach on me. So when I saw that I had the option to remain anonymous, I made a very shame-based decision at that point to remain anonymous and not have my face out there

A big part of the mystery and intrigue of the book is the anonymity of the author, but LB says this wasn’t a conscious decision initially. Given how the story was first shared—being sent around by various means via phones or printed out in library computers and passed around chapter by chapter—with fewer and fewer people knowing its source as it got more popular, the text was eventually uncoupled from its author. “When I was first writing, I wasn’t anonymous. My Piczo site had pictures of me in my school uniform and it had my full name, but then when it got so much bigger than me, what’s happening is you’re getting these pages printed out in the library at school or you’re receiving it on a text, slowly people don’t know where it’s come from,” says LB.

Making a mark

In telling the story of an idealised version of a working-class Black girl like herself, LB facilitated one of the earliest forms of representation for Black British teenagers, but on a personal level, LB has spent the 17 years since she first released Keisha the Sket grappling with “real feelings of shame” about writing about sex so vividly. “There are still sometimes points at which I feel that hairy, prickly shame feeling encroach on me. So when I saw that I had the option to remain anonymous, I made a very shame-based decision at that point to remain anonymous and not have my face out there,” she says. “I worked on the shame over the years, and I’ve got my own beliefs and feelings about the overfamiliarity of social media and also the hypervisibility of how social media would prefer one to be. I just don’t subscribe to any of that. So I’m very happy about having made this decision, albeit it being quite a shame-based one at the beginning.”

Publishing the original text alongside an updated, rewritten version and an author’s note—as well as four essays from influential Black figures discussing the book’s legacy and influence—was a way to take back control of the narrative regarding Keisha the Sket. “I’m quite a strong believer in the fact that I’m in charge of my own public image. It’s my responsibility and I can take control of it and I can dictate how people are going to engage with me,” she says. “So if I allow this book to just be the OG [original] version of the text, I’m allowing people to curate their own narrative about me and about the book and my writing ability and all of that sort of stuff.”